I want to share a very interesting, and for me profound, experience that happened as a result of my cat Angus’ surgery. The way I’m interpreting it, it’s directly related to body-oriented treatment of trauma.

He came home late Sunday night, around 10:00 pm. He paced the house quite a bit, knocking into everything (wearing a cone) before settling down to sleep on me. I’d decided to sleep on the couch with a few low lights on, just in case he had problems during the night.

At about 4:00 am, I woke up because he was shaking quite a bit. At first I was afraid he was having a seizure, but I could see his face and he looked quite calm. So I just observed. The shaking centralized in his back legs, then his front legs joined in. Then it rolled down his spine from his shoulders all the way to the tip of his tail. Then it all stopped, he heaved a huge sigh, and was still. In a few minutes, it started again. He went through this cycle four times, each time with less intensity. As I observed it, I was struck with impressions of fear, confusion, and a sense of “I’m home; I’m safe.” These were all more inner knowing rather than emotions or images in my mind. I have no way of knowing if that was what he was experiencing…it was just present for me. During the whole time, his face was calm and his heart rate was normal.

This shaking was very different than the twitching that dogs and cats often do in their sleep. It followed this specific pattern to completion each time, and it was more of a full-body shaking. I was reminded of a video I saw several years ago and again recently at a Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) training. It is of a polar bear being chased down by men in a helicopter so they can tranquilize him as part of the effort to track polar bears in the wild. As he is recovering from the tranquilizer, he goes through a shaking process that is, in theory, releasing the fear and trauma of being chased, anesthetized, and handled by humans:

Witnessing this same process in Angus while he was stretched out on my side was an embodied experience for me as well. I don’t really know how to describe it, except that I have a much better sense of the value of letting traumatic experience flow out of the body as soon as possible. I can only guess that it happened six hours after getting home because it took that long for him to accept that he really was safe. It may also be connected to the anesthesia from the surgery, being sedated twice after that while at the hospital, and the heavy medication he was still on at the time.

He’s doing well now, though very aggravated at the continued presence of The Cone.